Lunar – macOS utility to set brightness and volume on external monitors • Hacker News Board

Re: Lunar – macOS utility to set brightness and volume on external monitors

#81

Post by stevewillows » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 9:04 PM UTC

alin23 wrote: post #31

Creator of Lunar here. Thank you all for the kind comments and generous donations and many thanks to the OP for posting this! Let me know if you have any questions or quick feedback about Lunar.

I've been using your app for a while now. I love it. It's worked flawlessly from the get-go, too.

Thanks for making this! Having keys to adjust the brightness is such a blessing for my workflow.

Re: Lunar – macOS utility to set brightness and volume on external monitors

#82

Post by ProfessorLayton » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 9:06 PM UTC

I can't believe this works on my 11yo Dell monitor connected via Thunderbolt> Dock> Displayport. Thank you!

I haven't messed with the brightness in years because the OSD is so bad.

I would honestly base my next monitor purchase based on compatibility with this utility!

Re: Lunar – macOS utility to set brightness and volume on external monitors

#83

Post by car » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 9:06 PM UTC

ollysb wrote: post #69

Don't know if it's specific to LG monitors but the brightness controls on my keyboard modify the screen of whichever window has focus.

For me when pressing the Mac brightness keys Lunar changes the monitor where the mouse is located.

Re: Lunar – macOS utility to set brightness and volume on external monitors

#84

Post by car » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 9:08 PM UTC

rosstex wrote: post #57

I just tried Lunar out, it definitely makes the brightness on the external monitor higher than the Laptop monitor. How bright is too bright?

I think you can bracket the brightness in Lunar for each monitor, i.e. max 70%.

Re: Lunar – macOS utility to set brightness and volume on external monitors

#85

Post by alin23 » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 9:09 PM UTC

kposehn wrote: post #78

Thanks for making this. Light years better than the original app I was using as it lets me change the volume stepper control, though the scroll/swipe motions in settings are bit jarring to use.

I'm glad you find it useful!

Up/down arrow keys can also be used to adjust values in the UI while the cursor is on a value.

I mostly use scrolling for rough adjustments and arrow keys for fine tuning. It feels faster than simply editing a text field. Although I'm planning to make the fields editable in the future as a lot of users have requested that.

Re: Lunar – macOS utility to set brightness and volume on external monitors

#86

Post by jordache » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 9:13 PM UTC

volume control doesn't work

Re: Lunar – macOS utility to set brightness and volume on external monitors

#87

Post by alin23 » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 9:15 PM UTC

grishka wrote: post #79

I've tried some of these a while ago. It locked up my entire system requiring a hard reset every time it tried to send a command to the monitor.

This is usually a hardware problem. I haven't found an easy way to detect if a GPU+monitor combination will have a very slow response time for DDC messages so all I can do in Lunar is send the messages to the monitor and if a number of messages fail then Lunar stops sending them to keep the system usable.

But there are cases like yours where the response time is so slow that the kernel panics in the first DDC message and freezes the whole system. There's no way to detect or recover from that in software.

Re: Lunar – macOS utility to set brightness and volume on external monitors

#88

Post by alin23 » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 9:16 PM UTC

jordache wrote: post #86

volume control doesn't work

Unfortunately not all monitors support volume control through DDC.

Re: Lunar – macOS utility to set brightness and volume on external monitors

#89

Post by alin23 » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 9:19 PM UTC

mjcohen wrote: post #76

Doesn't work on 2014 Mac Mini running High sierra. Does nothing and goes away.

I think High Sierra doesn't have the Swift 5 libraries. You might need to install them from the Apple website first: https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1998?locale=en_US

I have that information in the troubleshooting section on Github but I'll have to update the official website to also include that.

Re: Lunar – macOS utility to set brightness and volume on external monitors

#90

Post by car » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 9:23 PM UTC

alin23 wrote: post #31

Creator of Lunar here. Thank you all for the kind comments and generous donations and many thanks to the OP for posting this! Let me know if you have any questions or quick feedback about Lunar.

Thank you for making Lunar!

Your app has been a godsend for my multimonitor setup, Macbook in clamshell mode. I tried a bunch of tools, but eventually gave up frustrated after crashes.

Love Lunar since I discovered it, it’s been working smooth from day one.